Terms of Service

The agreement that governs your use of Homeward

1. 1. Acceptance and Eligibility
2. 2. What Homeward Is, and Is Not
3. 3. Your License to Use Homeward
4. 4. Your Key and This Device
5. 5. Your Reflections Are Yours
6. 6. Acceptable Use
7. 7. Subscriptions and Purchases
8. 8. Scripture and Third-Party Content
9. 9. Our Intellectual Property
10. 10. Termination
11. 11. Disclaimers
12. 12. Limitation of Liability and Indemnification
13. 13. Governing Law and Disputes
14. 14. Apple and Google Terms
15. 15. Changes to the Service and These Terms
16. 16. Contact

1. Acceptance and Eligibility

Welcome to Homeward: Bible Reflection. These Terms of Service are a binding agreement between you and Ilia Libelman, an individual in Israel who builds and operates Homeward (referred to below as Homeward, we, or us). By making a purchase or using the app, you accept these terms and our Privacy Policy, which is incorporated into this agreement.

You must be at least 13 years old and legally able to enter into this agreement to use Homeward. If the law where you live sets a higher age for services like this one, that higher age applies.

This agreement is between you and Homeward only. Apple and Google are not parties to it and are not responsible for the app or its content.

2. What Homeward Is, and Is Not

Homeward is a Christian devotional app: Scripture reading, AI-assisted reflection and answers grounded in Catholic teaching (Reflect), the Examen and daily prayer, a church-year calendar, and a candle chapel for quiet prayer.

Reflect conversations are with an artificial intelligence, not a human, pastor, or counselor. The app marks this in the product itself: before your first reflection the room says responses are generated by an AI companion, its header says so on every visit, and 'About this room' (one tap away) says it is not confession to clergy, spiritual direction, therapy, or a sacrament. The AI never speaks as God or Jesus, never grants absolution or assigns penance, and never diagnoses any condition. It is a companion for reflection, not an authority, and like all AI it can be wrong, incomplete, or theologically imperfect.

• Homeward is not therapy, medical care, or mental-health treatment, and provides no diagnosis or treatment.
• Homeward is not clergy, pastoral counseling, spiritual direction, confession, or a sacrament.
• Homeward is not a crisis service. If you are in danger or thinking about harming yourself, contact emergency services (911 in the US) or call or text the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline (US).

When a conversation touches on safety, the app surfaces crisis resources. For serious spiritual or mental-health matters, please talk with your pastor, priest, or a licensed professional. Homeward does not guarantee alignment with any denomination’s doctrine; your own church and tradition remain the authority.

The candle chapel is a devotional ritual, and it stays that way: we never sell candles and never attach purchases to prayer.

3. Your License to Use Homeward

We grant you a limited, personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable license to use the app on devices you own or control, as permitted by the usage rules of the app store you downloaded it from. All rights not expressly granted are reserved.

• Do not copy, modify, reverse engineer, or decompile the app except where the law allows it despite this term.
• Do not scrape or bulk-extract the Scripture or calendar databases, or use the service to build a competing product or dataset. This does not restrict content identified in the app as Creative Commons licensed.
• Do not resell, rent, sublicense, or transfer the app or your access to it.
• Do not use the app or its output to train AI models, and do not access the service with bots or other automated means.

4. Your Key and This Device

Homeward has no account. Your access is tied to a key the app creates on this device; its first eight characters are the support code shown in the Sacristy (Settings). Deleting Homeward data from this device ends that identity and gives the device a new key. A subscription is restored through the store with Restore purchases.

Your journal, the Examen, carried notes, candles and the bell live only on this device. If you delete the app or Homeward’s data, that device-only data is gone, and we are not liable for its loss.

Keep your device secure and tell us if you suspect misuse of your key. We may refuse service to a key that breaches these terms, as described under Termination.

5. Your Reflections Are Yours

You own everything you write in Homeward. Your reflections belong to you, not to us.

So that the app can work, you grant us a limited, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to host, store, transmit, and process your content solely to provide the service to you, including sending the text of a turn to our AI service providers to generate a response and to find relevant passages. This license is used for nothing else and ends when the sealed copies our servers keep of your content expire or are deleted, on the schedule the Privacy Policy gives (section 10).

We do not use your reflections to train AI models. We do not sell them. We do not use them for advertising. Our AI providers do not train on them under the terms we use them on.

You confirm you have the right to what you submit, and you agree not to submit other people’s private or sensitive information. Feedback about the app itself, as distinct from your spiritual content, may be used freely to improve Homeward.

6. Acceptable Use

• Do not use Homeward for anything unlawful, harassing, or abusive.
• Do not try to make the AI violate its safeguards, for example by prompting it to speak as God, grant absolution, or produce a diagnosis.
• Do not interfere with the service: no probing, load attacks, or circumventing subscription entitlement checks.
• Do not upload malware or content you have no right to share.

The service may refuse, filter, or redirect certain inputs for safety and policy reasons; a safety refusal is part of the product, not a defect. We may rate-limit or refuse service to protect Homeward and its users.

7. Subscriptions and Purchases

Some features require payment. What each plan includes, its price, and its billing period are shown at the point of purchase, before you buy.

• Auto-renewable subscriptions renew automatically at the then-current price unless you cancel at least 24 hours before the end of the current period. The renewal charge is applied to your app store account within 24 hours before the period ends.
• Manage or cancel in your App Store account settings (iOS) or Google Play subscriptions (Android). Deleting the app, or deleting Homeward data from this device, does not cancel a subscription. Access continues until the end of the paid period.
• Free trials and introductory offers, when we make them, convert to a paid subscription at the disclosed price unless cancelled before the trial ends. Eligibility limits may apply.
• Prices may change. For an active subscription, changes take effect under the rules of your app store, which provides notice and, where required, asks your consent before charging an increased price.
• Purchases billed through Apple or Google are refunded by Apple or Google under their policies. Please direct refund requests to the store you purchased from.

We may offer additional plans, tiers, bundles, one-time purchases, gift or promotional offers, and other paid offerings in the future, through the app stores or other purchase channels we make available. Each offering is described at the point of purchase, together with its own billing and refund terms where they differ.

One thing will never be for sale: the candle chapel. We do not charge for lighting a candle and we do not place purchases near prayer.

What your subscription unlocks is determined on our servers. Any subscription state shown in the app is informational only. Prices vary by region, and taxes may apply.

8. Scripture and Third-Party Content

Bible verse text in Homeward is reproduced from our own database of public-domain translations — today the World English Bible — and of any licensed translations we add later, never generated by the AI. Each translation’s required notice appears on the Licenses screen in the app (Sacristy → Open-source licenses), which is the canonical list of third-party notices.

The longer event stories opened from the church-year calendar are adapted from Wikipedia articles and are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0); the calendar's own one-line descriptions of each day are ours. We have modified those texts, we attribute the source articles in the app, and those texts remain available to you under the same license. They are excluded from every exclusivity claim and restriction in these terms. Attribution does not imply that Wikipedia or any translation publisher endorses Homeward.

9. Our Intellectual Property

The Homeward name, logo, app design, software, original devotional text, and the compilation of our databases belong to us and are protected by intellectual-property law. This claim does not extend to the underlying ancient Scripture texts or to Creative Commons licensed material.

These terms grant no right to use our name or branding. If you believe content in Homeward infringes your copyright, write to support@homewardbible.com.

10. Termination

You may stop using Homeward at any time and delete Homeward data from this device in the Sacristy. What our servers hold under your key expires on the schedule in the Privacy Policy, or is deleted sooner on request. No export feature exists: your writing lives only on this device.

We may suspend or terminate your access if you breach these terms, use the service unlawfully, or harm the service or its users, with notice where practicable. Termination for breach does not entitle you to a refund beyond your app store’s policy.

We may discontinue the service or particular features, with reasonable notice to paying subscribers. Sections that by their nature should survive termination, including content licenses until deletion, disclaimers, liability limits, and dispute terms, survive.

11. Disclaimers

Homeward’s content is devotional. We make no promise of spiritual, emotional, or personal outcomes, and no promise that any reflection fits the teaching of your church or denomination.

The service is provided as is and as available. To the extent permitted by law, we disclaim implied warranties, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement, and we do not warrant that the service will be uninterrupted, error-free, or secure, or that AI output will be accurate. Some jurisdictions do not allow certain warranty exclusions, so parts of this section may not apply to you.

12. Limitation of Liability and Indemnification

To the extent permitted by law, Homeward is not liable for indirect, incidental, consequential, special, or punitive damages, or for loss of data, arising from your use of the service, including reliance on AI output or spiritual or emotional outcomes. To the same extent, our total liability for all claims is capped at the greater of the amounts you paid us in the 12 months before the claim or 100 US dollars.

Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited, and nothing here takes away consumer rights the law gives you.

If your breach of these terms or unlawful use of the service causes a third party to bring a claim against us, you agree to cover the resulting losses and reasonable legal costs.

13. Governing Law and Disputes

These terms are governed by the law of the place where Homeward’s operator resides — today Israel — without regard to conflict-of-laws rules.

If something goes wrong, talk to us first: email support@homewardbible.com with a description of the problem, and we will try in good faith to resolve it with you for 30 days before either of us starts a formal proceeding. Either party may bring a qualifying claim in small-claims court, and either party may seek injunctive relief for intellectual-property misuse at any time.

This version of the terms does not require arbitration; disputes that cannot be resolved informally belong to the courts of the governing-law place.

14. Apple and Google Terms

If you downloaded Homeward from the Apple App Store, the following terms also apply.

• This agreement is between you and Homeward, not Apple. Homeward, not Apple, is solely responsible for the app and its content, and for maintenance and support; Apple has no obligation to provide any maintenance or support.
• Your license is limited to use of the app on Apple-branded devices you own or control, as permitted by the App Store Usage Rules, including any Family Sharing access those rules allow.
• If the app fails to conform to an applicable warranty, you may notify Apple and Apple will refund the purchase price. To the maximum extent permitted by law, Apple has no other warranty obligation for the app.
• Homeward, not Apple, is responsible for addressing claims relating to the app, including product-liability claims, claims that the app fails to meet legal or regulatory requirements, consumer-protection claims, and any third-party claim that the app infringes intellectual-property rights.
• You represent that you are not located in a country subject to a US government embargo and are not on any US government list of prohibited or restricted parties, and you agree to comply with applicable third-party terms, such as your wireless data agreement, when using the app.
• Questions or complaints about the app can be sent to support@homewardbible.com.
• Apple and its subsidiaries are third-party beneficiaries of these terms and may enforce them against you.

If you downloaded Homeward from Google Play: Google is not a party to these terms and is not responsible for the app. Subscriptions purchased on Android are billed by Google Play, are managed and cancelled through the Google Play subscriptions center, and are refunded under Google Play’s policies.

15. Changes to the Service and These Terms

Homeward will grow, and we may add, change, or remove features, including moving features between free and paid tiers prospectively. Such changes never reach the candle chapel’s free, unmonetized nature.

These terms carry a version number and a date, shown at the top. A material change ships only in a new version of the app, with a new date and version here, and the text your build carries is always in the Archive inside the app. The current version is also published at https://homewardbible.com/terms. Continuing to use Homeward after updating to that version is acceptance. A material change affecting an active subscription applies from your next renewal. Prior versions of these terms are available on request.

16. Contact

Questions about these terms: support@homewardbible.com. We read everything and aim to reply within a few days.